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Comment by beart | Hacker News Reader

I have a close friend who is an officer nearing twenty years. He has not had a tendency to criticize his job. However, he has been adamant that vaccines are incredibly important for the military and the policy changes have really angered him, specifically because of the damage it does to readiness.

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The covid refusal also became a scam. If you refused then you couldnt be deployed. But it tool months to kick people out. So people who didnt want to deploy would refuse and then agree to get the shot at the last minute. So it kept them home for up to six months while thier buddies went overseas..

The US has a volunteer army, if you don't want to do army things why be there in the first place?

Volunteer, but only on the way in. And new recruits are very young. Things in thier lives change. They grow up a bit and often want out, but cant get out. Being stuck in a multi-year term of service doesnt feel like a volunteer army to them.

yeah this be the answer.

easy to volunteer when you're a hoodrat or hillbilly and it's the only way out of your situation.

but that's just the way in. Problem is you're on the hook for 4+ years and you can't just quit. I've definitely had white collar jobs I got to, realized it was fuckin miserable, and noped out in < 2 years. Cuz, like, I can just quit.

you end up in a shitty unit with a shitty boss, you get to eat shit for ~4 years, and will go to jail if you fuckup or disappear.

put another way, there is some statistic like 25% of military recruits who get kicked out get kicked out in the first year; it wasn't what they thought it'd be

Economics

Young people want the benefits like the promised free college, but don't want to get sent off to die for a cause nobody believes in and nobody approved.

Add this to the list of reasons the US will never have nationalized free education or even student loan reform.

Also forgiving a loan that both parties signed willingly is dumb and solves nothing.

More accurate to call it a mercenary army. These people presumably collected paychecks and benefits the whole time.

> However, he has been adamant that vaccines are incredibly important for the military ...

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/smallpox-inoculation-revolu...

> During the 1700s, smallpox raged through the American colonies and the Continental Army. Smallpox impacted the Continental Army severely during the Revolutionary War, so much so that George Washington mandated inoculation for all Continental soldiers in 1777. Just fifty-six years earlier, in 1721, Bostonian doctors and clergy introduced the procedure to the American colonies. Without the vision and determination of these early Bostonians in normalizing inoculation, Washington may not have made the decision to mandate inoculation for the Continental Army. Though it was a controversial action, many historians credit the medical mandate with the colonists’ victory in the Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States of America.

https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collect...

> HEAD QUARTERS MORRIS TOWN 12TH MARCH 1777

> Sir

> You are hereby required immediately to send me an exact return of your regiment, and to send all your recruits, who have had the small pox to join the Army. Those, who have not, are to be sent to Philadelphia, and put under the direction of the commanding officer there, who will have them inoculated.

If I remember correctly, the Battle of Agincourt, where the Welsh archers destroyed the French knights, was fought by archers with their pants around their ankles.

Apparently, there was a dysentery outbreak. They didn’t retreat, because they couldn’t. Maybe that was the thinking behind this edict.

>he has been adamant that vaccines are incredibly important for the military and the policy changes have really angered him, specifically because of the damage it does to readiness.

Your friend knows his history; disease has been the leading cause of death in warfare, historically, killing more soldiers than actual combat.

Did we ever get a vaccine for trench foot?

No, because trench foot is something not treatable by vaccines.

However, we did receive a lot of training in how to avoid and treat it, along with better equipment. Does that count as a “vaccine”?

It depends on if trench foot treatment is woke or not.

> Did we ever get a vaccine for trench foot?

> No, because trench foot is something not treatable by vaccines.

Isn’t that tautological?

History and the future are full of things that can be treated with a vaccine that were not previously.

I apologize if I’m missing the point you’re making, but trench foot and vaccines are completely unrelated.

Vaccines fundamentally impact viruses. Trench foot is not caused by a virus, or any infection. It’s more akin to frostbite.

We’re really pushing the boundaries of what we can do with vaccines, but the root cause of trench foot is poor circulation, and a vaccine can’t really fix that.

I thought we are making cancer vaccines now. We are literally developing vaccines to fight thrombosis (aka blood circulation).[1] And we have vaccines that work against bacteria, specific toxins, parasites etc. Not sure you and I agree on what a vaccine is or does.

[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.118....

> specifically because of the damage it does to readiness.

I have habit of watching historical YouTube videos and so many times battles were lost or sieges were broken because one side got sick and could not keep fighting.

Only an ignorant who never studied history would voluntarily remove vaccination from army units.

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